Grocery Shopping

Although I have more to post about my most recent adventures in Rome, I want to write quickly about my experience in an Italian grocery store. I've put off shopping for food for almost a week because I've been too nervous and had too many questions - How do you know what a good deal is? What are the brands to stay away from? How do you separate the produce purchases at the open market (mercato) from a more traditional setting (supermercato)? What if I don't understand the store clerk?... the list goes on.

Well, I finally grew hungry enough today to go out and have an adventure in this realm. Admittedly it was difficult knowing what to buy, and a lot of my favorite meal ingredients aren't available here (such as cheddar cheese, refried beans, and tortillas for burritos), but half an hour later, I successfully walked out of the supermercato with bread, eggs, milk, yogurt, and mozzarella cheese (wow, that's a lot of dairy... but I'm too scared to navigate the meat counter just yet). After that, I purchased some wonderful looking tomatoes (pomadori) from a fruit and vegetable stand, and during my interaction with the store clerk, I only understood about one in every three or four words. Smile and nod, Anna, I kept telling myself. Although I'm sure some crucial information was lost in translation (such as "Would you like your tomatoes in your other bag?", I got home safe and sound - 9 euros poorer but with enough food to feed me for a while.

This interaction made me appreciate foreigners in America a lot more, because I now know from first-hand experience how much courage it can take to do simple things such as shop for groceries, because these sorts of things are not really seen from an outsider's perspective and it's hard to know how to act. In the future, I'm sure that I'll still be confounded by most of the words that come out of the clerks' mouths, but I hope that every time I go shopping, I'll become more and more confident in my purchasing skills.

Now time to go make a tomato and mozzarella sandwich. Yummmm.